Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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I thank the witnesses for their concise presentations. It is a topic that does not allow itself to be very concise because there are so many issues involved. As Ms O'Brien just said, even at the height of the Celtic tiger there were jobless families, so it is not a new phenomenon and we never managed to fully address it, even when there was additional money in the coffers. One of the key things for me is how to make work pay. Part of that is addressing low pay, job displacement and zero-hour contracts. It is not in our gift as members of the joint committee to address all of this. There was a report that highlighted two groups in receipt of social welfare who, if they went back to work, could end up with less money and in deepened poverty. Those groups are one-parent families and families with quite a number of children. Part of the problem was that they would lose their benefits. Some of the transitional arrangements were cut back by this Government and lately some of those cuts have been reversed in acknowledgement that they were wrong. What transitional arrangements are required to make it easier for jobless families taking up work?

I usually speak on social protection, but the other part is education. What additional educational supports can be put in place to break the cycle? It is accepted that education is a vehicle for getting out of poverty. In my own area, I met a number of school principals in Ballyfermot last year who were concerned about cuts to the Traveller education project. They could see that the days of young people staying out of school were returning very quickly. They felt that when there had been investment in Traveller teachers and extra supports, a pathway had been set for a group which was very marginalised and often very poor. If that was identifiable, I presume the same can be said about the families discussed in the three presentations today. What are the additional supports? What framework do we need to put in place now to ensure that as the economy grows in the future, supports will be in place so that if we have the supposed 100% employment - which never really happens - it will also benefit jobless families, especially those that have been jobless for a number of generations?